He moans like an animal, like a dog run over by a car lying along the side of a road.

Two enormous purple black eyes punctuate his face.

But there are no bandages on his body, no bloody gauze wrapped around his head like mine.

Probably a percussion wound, a high-intensity explosion too close to his head. Brain trauma. Air particles propelled so fast and hard they shot through his skull and jellied his brain.

Aces and eights, man. That's all this war deals—Aces and eights every hand.

I wonder if he'll ever wake, or if his brain is too filled with holes.

Luck. Dumb fucking bad luck.

And something else, something that I saw yesterday when they were turning him from one position to the other.

A small wound, maybe a half an inch long, at the base of his neck.

One tiny piece of shrapnel—that's all it took to sever his spine, to paralyze his body from the neck down.

Aces and eights, man. Nothing but aces and eights all the way down the line.

He moans and moans.

He wants to scratch out his eyes, to dig into his eye sockets and tear out the pain throbbing in his head.

But he can't.

His arms are bound, strapped to the bed.

Every two hours someone comes to rotate him 180 degrees.

Each time someone comes, his moans rise to a crescendo.

Each time they leave, his moans die out to a dull bay like a wounded water buffalo.

I call him Panda.

In the Head Ward's black night, when I hear the shuffling feet of the somnambulant moving through the ward, his moans give content and context to my terror dreams.

I see Panda's purple-black eyes wide-open, blank, empty as bullet holes in the night ward's dusk—eyes that haunt me like the eyes of the undead—a ghost's eyes gazing into a tomorrow that will never come.

Panda.

Panda's enormous purple-splotched eyes ethereal in the waking ward.

rg cantalupo (Ross Canton) was an RTO (Radio Operator) for an infantry company in the 25th Infantry Division, 1968-69. He was awarded three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star with a Combat V for Valor for courage under fire. His memoir, The Light Where Shadows End, was published in May 2016.